Gain insight into spikes or dips in your site's traffic.

Use traffic alerts to monitor traffic levels and learn how different marketing channels are performing. With traffic alerts, you'll see annotations on your traffic analytics graph for spikes or dips in traffic, and insights into what caused them.

This helps you monitor traffic, spot unusual changes, and learn how different marketing channels are performing.

Tip: Download the Squarespace app to receive notifications when there's a spike. 

Traffic alerts are available on Business, Commerce, Professional, and Premium plans.

How it works

Traffic alerts use a machine learning technique called "anomaly detection" to identify statistically significant traffic changes. For example, you might see a spike in traffic from Facebook after you post, or a dip if you stop using one of your regular marketing channels. This tool's machine learning technology will improve its insights over time as it collects more data.

Anomaly detection compares current traffic volume to traffic from the previous 28 days. Your traffic needs to be lower or higher than 99% of your traffic distribution for the last 28 days to be considered a significant change. This means your site needs to have traffic for at least 28 days before anomaly detection starts noticing patterns and unusual changes. 

To learn more about machine learning and other technology that powers Squarespace, visit the Squarespace Engineering blog.

View anomalies

An anomaly is a significant change in traffic volume based on your site’s historical data. This event will display as a pulsing exclamation point on your traffic analytics line graph.

To find an anomaly:

1. Open the Analytics panel and click Traffic.
2. In the chart at the top of the page, use the drop-down menu to choose the date range.
3. Click an alert icon to see more information.

Review anomaly details

Click an alert icon to display:

• The date of the anomaly.
• The traffic volume during the anomaly.
• For spikes, the top pages (up to two) viewed during the traffic spike and percentage of traffic they accounted for.
• For dips, the top pages (up to two) that have decreased in volume, and percentage of traffic they accounted for.
• The top channels that contributed to the spike or dip.

Address an anomaly

Anomaly detection lets you know which traffic sources are contributing to the change in volume. You can use that information to identify traffic drivers and make changes to improve your site's overall traffic. For example, if you're receiving less traffic from Facebook than usual, test different social sharing strategies to see which methods are most effective for your content.

Squarespace Customer Support can't provide specific advice for improving your analytics because everyone's content, goals, and audience are different. We recommend experimenting to find out what has the best results for your site.

Share feedback

At the bottom of each anomaly detail page, you’ll see an Is this helpful? message with the option to leave feedback. This goes directly to the team that built this tool and helps us make anomaly detection more useful and accurate.

To send feedback:

1. Under Is this helpful? click the thumbs up or down button.
2. To leave more comments, type them in the comment field.
3. Click Send.